Milo Rojas, 53, runs a vintage travel trailer restoration shop out of a converted 1950s gas station outside Maryville, Tennessee. He’s got calluses thick as leather across both palms from 18 years of sanding aluminum skin and cranking rusted bolts, and a petty grudge against the local women’s club that’s lasted four full years. Back when his wife left him for a cross-country long haul trucker, the club dropped off 17 tuna casseroles at his shop door, none of which he ate, most of which he gave to the feral cat colony that hangs around the back lot. He’d turned down every invitation to town events ever since, until his buddy who runs the annual Blount County Fall BBQ Cookoff bribed him with free brisket for a month to bring his fully restored 1962 Airstream Bambi as a display.
He’s wiping smudges off the Airstream’s polished side when a shadow falls over his work. The air smells like hickory smoke, sweet apple cider donuts from the 4-H booth, and the sharp tang of vinegar-based rib sauce from the stall 10 feet away. He looks up, and there’s Elara Voss, the 49-year-old widow who moved to town from Chicago last year and took over as head of the women’s club six months prior. The town gossip mill has painted her as stuck-up, unapproachable, the kind of woman who’d turn her nose up at a paper plate of pulled pork. She’s holding a mason jar of bright green pickled okra, her left hand wrapped around the iced glass so her knuckles are pinked from the cold. When he reaches out to take the jar, their fingers brush, and he feels the rough callus on her index finger, identical to the ones he has on his left hand from running an orbital sander for hours at a time.
She brought the okra as a thank you for showing up, she says, and adds that she canceled the club’s mandatory casserole drop policy for newly single or grieving folks three weeks into her tenure. She’d gotten 22 lasagnas in the month after her husband died in a construction accident two years prior, she says, and most of them went to the county animal shelter. He snorts, sets the jar on the Airstream’s metal bumper, and says he probably owes her a beer for that call alone.
She leans against the trailer beside him, her shoulder brushing his bicep every time a group of attendees shuffles past and they shift to make room. She tells him she’s been restoring a 1920s tobacco barn on the 10 acres she bought west of town, and she’s been stuck on the aluminum roofing for three weeks, can’t get the seams to stop leaking no matter how many YouTube tutorials she binges. He’s got 15 years of experience sealing Airstream seams, so he launches into the trick with butyl tape and a low-heat heat gun, and she leans in closer to hear him over the roar of the crowd and the twang of the country band playing the main stage, her chestnut hair brushing his jaw, cedar and vanilla perfume mixing with the hickory smoke in the air. He spots a smudge of BBQ sauce on her left cheek, and almost reaches up to wipe it off, but stops himself, half convinced this is a setup, that the women’s club is just trying to rope him into volunteering for some holiday fundraiser.
The event wraps up around 7 p.m., the sun dipping low over the Smoky Mountains to paint the sky streaks of tangerine and dusty rose. She slings a frayed canvas tote over her shoulder, says she’s got a cooler of hazy IPA in the back of her beat-up Ford F-150, and a wool blanket rolled up beside it. She asks if he wants to walk the half mile down to the creek behind the fairgrounds, no crowds, no gossips, just quiet. He hesitates for half a second, remembers telling his shop assistant the week prior that he’d never speak to anyone affiliated with the women’s club as long as he lived, remembers the gossip that says she doesn’t date small town guys, that she’s just here to flip property and leave. Then he looks at her, grinning, that smudge of sauce still on her cheek, her work boots caked in dry mud from the barn earlier that day, and he says yeah, that sounds good.
They trudge down the dirt path to the creek, no one else around, just the sound of crickets chirping and the distant clink of beer bottles as the cookoff vendors pack up their stalls. She spreads the thick wool blanket on the soft grass by the bank, pulls two cold cans of IPA out of the cooler, and when he reaches for his, his hand covers hers, and he doesn’t pull away. He brushes the smudge of BBQ sauce off her cheek with his thumb, and she tilts her face up to his, her hazel eyes warm in the fading golden light. She leans in, and her lips brush his, soft at first, then firmer, as the first firefly blinks to life a foot away from the edge of the blanket.
